Not my favourite Didion (I’d have benefitted from knowing more about the political context in the US from the 60s - late 80s before going in), but even the less good Didion books are still worth a read.

hard to rate as I read it over such a long period of time, but not my favourite didion!

Didion continues to be my favorite non-fiction author. The precision of her language matches the precision of her analysis, whether she's describing on the micro scale of how minute gestures of an interviewee reveal their worldview, or the macro scale of Washington politics in the Reagan era. Here (circa '87) she's plumbing the gulf between Miami's Cuban and Anglo populations, and the complicated relation of Cuban anti-Castro militants to Washington, "la lucha" (the struggle) and each other. Many fascinating characters, stories, counter-stories and observations.

In her earlier book Salvador, I think Didion allowed the terrifying absurdities she witnessed to overcome her willingness to analyze. Here, though she is still dealing with complicated and murky subject matter, she emerges with some clear conclusions about how Washington's abstractions create its own monsters, and there's a chilling and prophetic underlining of this when, in a Washington conservative think-tank presentation about rolling back the Soviet empire ('87, remember), she notes the character of Jack Wheeler drumming up support for the Islamic mujahideen fighters in Afghanistan.

"During the spring when I began visiting Miami all of Florida was reported to be in drought, with dropping water tables and unfilled aquifers and SAVE WATER signs, but drought, in a part of the world which would be in its natural state a shelf of porous oolitic limestone covered most of the year by a shallow sheet flow of fresh water, proved relative. During this drought the city of Coral Gables continued, as it had every night since 1934, to empty and refill its Venetian Pool with fresh unchlorinated water, 820,000 gallons a day out of the water supply and into the storm sewer. There was less water than there might have been in the Biscayne Aquifer but there was water everywhere above it. There were rains so hard that windshield wipers stopped working and cars got swamped and stalled on I-95. There was water roiling and bobbling over the underwater lights in decorative pools. There was water sluicing off the six-story canted window at the Omni, a hotel from which it was possible to see, in the Third World way, both the slums of Overtown and those island houses with the Unusual Security and Ready Access to the ocean, equally wet. Water plashed off banana palms, water puddled on flat roofs, water streamed down the CARNE U.S. GOOD & U.S. STANDARD signs on Flagler Street. Water rocked the impounded drug boats which lined the Miami River and water lapped against the cause-ways on the bay. I got used to the smell of incipient mildew in my clothes. I stuffed Kleenex in wet shoes and stopped expecting them to dry.

A certain liquidity suffused everything about the place. Causeways and bridges and even Brickell Avenue did not stay put but rose and fell, allowing the masts of ships to glide among the marble and glass facades of the unleased office buildings. The buildings themselves seemed to swim free against the sky: there had grown up in Miami during the recent money years an architecture which appeared to have slipped its moorings, a not inappropriate style for a terrain with only a provisional claim on being land at all. Surfaces were oblique, opalescent. Angles were oblique, intersection to disorienting effects. The Arquitectonica office, which produced the celebrated glass condominium on Brickell Avenue with the fifty-foot cube cut from its center, the frequently photographed "sky patio" in which there floated a palm tree, a Jacuzzi, and a lipstick-red spiral staircase, accompanied its elevations with crayon sketches, all moons and starry skies and airborne maidens, as in a Chagall."

Ingen kan slendre gennem en by som Joan Didion. Jeg forstår ikke hvorfor den her bog kun har 3,68/5? Omvendt er det jo 7,3/10, som vel ikke er helt dårligt, eller hvad?

It was either this one, or Salvador that I liked a little less, but I cannot remember right now.

I rarely pick up non fiction books. I don't think it is because I dislike them. I think most of the time, non fiction is a little more bland that a good fiction book. This book, however, was interesting. It follows specific people. Some of the things talked about in this book happened when I was a young child and I have no recollection of these things happening. It was a good read and I found myself wanting to know more about certain things that happened during the time period.

this book was a perfect snapshot of miami in the 80s- conflict, lucha, revolution, violence, and most importantly, humanity. having grown up with many of these stories told to me, it was fascinating to get to read them in depth, and learn about the vast spectrum of anti-castro cubans and counter-revolutionaries that are not as widely discussed today. i will say, at some points the names and jargon were a bit hard to recall, as there was discussion of many historical events. overall though, i don’t think it detracted much from the reading experience and the portrait didion painted.

It may be about a specific time and place but so much is familiar; echo chambers, conspiracies within conspiracies that may or may not exist, smoke and mirrors diplomacy, and the unintended consequences of American overreach. Yes, very familiar.

Most of what I know (if not all) about Miami comes from my partner, who grew up in the city as a second generation Colombian American. He recommended this book to me as one of the only books that really captures what he thought and experienced as he grew up and I do admit that this book added a lot of background context to much of what he’s told me about the city and his own lived experiences.

A lot of this book is still relevant today: Florida (and particularly Latinx Florida) became a big storyline in 2020 election. Many people were confused by how Miami, a city with an enormous Latinx population, could still be pro-Trump— but no one community is a monolith. I see so much of the conservative/pro-Trump rhetoric alive today living in the pages of Miami and the history of the city in the past few decades, post-Cold War.

This book taught me more about Cuban—American policy than I previously understood in 24 years of life. Thanks Joan xo

i now have infinitely more than the zero knowledge i had when i started